1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of networking, specifically to the field of searching for and retrieval of information on a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wouldn""t it be nice to be able to log onto your local internet service provider, access the worldwide web, and search for some simple information, like xe2x80x9cPlease find me action movies with John Wayne which are in color?xe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cPlease find me audio files of Madonna talking?xe2x80x9d, or xe2x80x9cI would like black and white photos of the Kennedy assassinationxe2x80x9d. Or, how about even xe2x80x9cPlease find me an action movie starring Michael Douglas and show me a preview of portions of the movie where he is speaking loudlyxe2x80x9d. Perhaps, instead of searching the entire worldwide web, a company may want to implement this searching capability on its intranet.
Unfortunately, text based search algorithms cannot answer such queries. Yet, text based search tools are the predominate search tools available on the internet today. Even if text based search algorithms are enhanced to examine files for file type and, therefore, be able to detect whether a file is a audio, video or other multimedia file, little if any information is available about the content of the file beyond its file type.
Still further, what if the search returns a number of files. Which one is right? Can the user tell from looking at the title of the document or some brief text contained in the document as is done by many present day search engines? In the case of relatively small text files, downloading one or two or three xe2x80x9cwrongxe2x80x9d files, when searching for the right file, is not a major problem. However, when downloading relatively large multimedia files, it may be problematic to download the files without having a degree of assurance that the correct file has been found.
It is desireable to provide a search engine which is capable of searching the internet, or other large distributed network for multimedia information. It is also desirable that the search engine provide for analysis of the content of files found in the search and for display of previews of the information.